As "access brokers" to resources for their clients, homeless shelter workers are often in a position to aid victimized homeless women in securing medical and psychological services post-victimization. Given high rates of victimization within this population, we would expect that a routine part of a shelter's case management process would involve queries regarding victimization. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with 42 victimized homeless women in Chicago and Detroit, we sought to discover the extent to which such queries were pursued by staff at their current shelter. What we found is that women are seldom asked to provide a complete history that includes experiences of violent victimization and its effects. From these results, we make several recommendations aimed at improving homeless victims' access to services.
In the present study, we draw on interviews conducted with 79 homeless women in Detroit and Chicago to reveal the extent to which women in our sample have experienced multiple forms of trauma and other significant stressors over their life course, events that we show have had serious negative effects on their mental and emotional well-being. We then look at their ability to access counseling services and consider barriers to service use. For those women who have utilized counseling services, we examine their reported satisfaction with the services accessed and identify certain deficiencies. Based on our findings, we conclude that it could reasonably be argued that the ‘pathological homeless woman’ is a construct tied to women’s experiences with a health care system that frequently fails them.
In the present study, we draw on interviews conducted with 60 homeless women (N = 60) in Detroit and Chicago about their experiences of violent criminal victimization and their attitudes toward accessing various postvictimization assistance-in particular, mental health counseling. Contrary to the research literature, which tends to overemphasize pathological responses to victimization within this population, what our data reveals is the extent to which victimized homeless women exhibit signs of resiliency through both attitudes and coping behaviors. Further, their expressed attitudes demonstrate the existence of a complex set of relationships between trauma, resiliency, and the desire to access mental health services. These findings we suggest have implications for the delivery of mental health services to this group.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.